Very similar here. I am 68.

While I have never developed software professionally, in the four decades I have been using computers I have often written scripts and done other simple programming for my own purposes. When I was in my thirties and forties especially, I would often get enjoyably immersed in my little projects.

These days, I am feeling a new rush of drive and energy using Claude Code. At first, though, the feeling would come and go. I would come up with fun projects (in-browser synthesizers, multi-LLM translation engines) and get a brief thrill from being able to create them so quickly, but the fever would fade after a while. I started paying for the Max plan last June, but there were weeks at a time when I barely used it. I was thinking of downgrading to Pro when Opus 4.5 came along, I saw that it could handle more sophisticated tasks, and I got an idea for a big project that I wanted to do.

I have now spent the last two months having Claude write and build something I really wanted forty years ago, when I was learning Japanese and starting out as a Japanese-to-English translator: a dictionary that explains the meanings, nuances, and usages of Japanese words in English in a way accessible to an intermediate or advanced learner. Here is where it stands now:

https://www.tkgje.jp/

https://github.com/tkgally/je-dict-1

It will take a few more months before the dictionary is more or less finished, but it has already reached a stage where it should be useful for some learners. I am releasing all of the content into the public domain, so people can use and adapt it however they like.

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socalgal2 2 hours ago | parent [-]

This is neat that you had fun making this.

What are some good examples of where your app excels? I've currently got https://jisho.org bookmarked.

	▲	tkgally 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks! The strength of my dictionary, I hope, is how the information on each word is chosen and presented with the needs of English-speaking learners in mind, especially the explanations of meanings, usages, and nuances. Dictionaries that mainly give glosses can mislead learners, as it is rare for the meanings of words to map one-to-one between languages. Compare the following pairs of entries from TKG and Jisho.org: https://www.tkgje.jp/entries/03000/03495_chousen.html https://www.tkgje.jp/entries/11000/11013_charenji.html https://jisho.org/search/挑戦 https://jisho.org/search/チャレンジ While the two from Jisho.org have more information, they do not make clear the important differences between challenge in English and the two Japanese words. Claude, meanwhile, added this note: ‘In English, "challenge" often implies confrontation or difficulty. In Japanese, チャレンジ carries a strongly positive connotation of bravely attempting something new or difficult. It is closer in meaning to "attempt" or "try" than to "confront." ’ The entries for my dictionary are being written one at a time by Claude based on guidelines for the explanations, the length and vocabulary of the example sentences, etc. Those guidelines (which you can see in the prompts and Claude skills in the GitHub repository) were developed by me and Claude with a particular purpose in mind: helping a learner encountering an unfamiliar word get a good basic understanding of what it means and how it is used. In my experience, at least, it is very helpful to get explanations, not just glosses. The Jisho site does do a good job of linking together a lot of different databases. They are welcome to add links to entries in my dictionary, too, if they like.